Alejandro G Iñárritu

Attending the Sarajevo Film Festival to receive the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award, the two-time Oscar-winning Mexican director Alexandro G. Iñárritu is urging the film industry to guard against the influence of television storytelling in cinema, a looming crisis he said could strip film of the beauty and poetry that make it a unique artistic form of expression. Storytelling, he said: “needs much more contemplation, a little bit more patience, it needs to be a little bit more mysterious, more impenetrable, more poetic, more soulful.” Iñárritu continued speaking about the algorithmic model of streaming services: “Another problem is the dictatorship of the algorithm in the world we are living in.” Streaming services are managed by algorithms designed to keep feeding people what they like, he added. “And they stretch those tastes. When we make choices they start giving us more of that. The problem is that the algorithms are very smart but they are not creative, and they don’t know what people don’t know they like.” Cinema is in a dark and conservative place, globally, because of corporate appropriation of the medium.